Dali House

A blind hand reaches out in search of the pillow from which to gain the sleep of eternity. In a moment another Protestant blade will cross another Catholic neck. The nine-day Queen of England will be a mere lady again.

Paul Delaroche was gregariously maudlin in his choice of subject matter. Born in 1797, the son of a wealthy Paris art dealer who named him Hippolyte (the “Paul” came later, likely with relief), he learned from Antoine-Jean Gros how to make fat paintings. Géricault and Delacroix became his pals as he doled out partisan depictions of history’s piquant moments from a studio in the rue Mazarine.

Delaroche, in a portrait painted the year after he died, looking for all the world like that sneaky Kevin Spacey.

The pictures were as solid as those of Vernet and Ingres, and like them seized poetic licence and ran off with it into the hills of whimsy. The politics of his own country encouraged unflattering views of the English.
“The King in the Guard-Room, with villainous roundhead soldiers blowing tobacco smoke in his patient face” has been called a libel against the Puritans; “Queen Elizabeth dying on the Ground” (detail here) shows a monster beyond help or sympathy.

A little to your left, Ma’am.
Click the image to see it much larger.

Delaroche got away with stretching truth like other artists stretched canvases because of the heated melodrama he wrung from cold facts. It’s quite ironic that he was the best known of the early champions of Daguerre’s photography, the assessment of which the French government put him in charge in 1839. He gave the daguerreotype two thumbs up. “From today, painting is dead!” he’s infamously quoted as saying, although he probably never said it.

Stubborn people point out that 1833’s “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” is boneheadedly set in a dungeon, whereas the actual severing took place outdoors at the Tower of London (though what difference it made isn’t self-evident, since it was a “private execution” anyway).
And why, critics moaned, is she wearing French undies? Experts in such things spotted the lacing at the front; Englishwomen were bound at the back. The politics of unmentionables requires mentioning.

Normal people, though, are ready and willing to forgive the inaccuracies when they see the hands feeling for the chopping block and her attendants covering or diverting their own eyes from the chilling pathos of her failure to see. Apart from a pair of eyes bent heavenward, in fact, none are visible in the painting, thanks to the murk of shadow and the necessary direction of gaze. Just like life in the face of any hard truth.

Plainly read by the plain masses, Delaroche was popular enough that in 1837 he was commissioned to do a 27-metre-long mural of all the great modern artists for the lecture hall at the École des Beaux Arts. The vast “Hemicycle” assembled these illustrious illustrators on marble steps at the foot of three thrones where the Parthenon’s architects perched, while fetching muses loitered nearby.
He finished this wonder work in 1841, and it was first praised, then laughed at aloud. It is awfully wooden. Ictinus asks Cimabue when they’re serving cocktails; Velazquez bores Phidias with a war story. Everyone’s just milling about, waiting for Godot.

Delaroche tried to make up for it by painting Napoleon as many times as possible without the people at Guinness Records seeking a constraining order. He furiously churned out romantipics, “The Last Prayer of the Children of Edward IV”, “The Last Communion of Mary Stuart”, that sort of thing.
Fortunately for him, a fire damaged his erstwhile masterpiece, “Hemicycle”, and he was called upon for singe control. He hadn’t got far, though, when he died on November 4, 1856.

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What was a Frenchman doing meddling in British soap opera anyway?
Probably Charles X’s restoration to the French throne was the big factor. Charles’ brother, Louis XVI, had felt the sting of the steel too, albeit via the dispassionate machinery of the passionate French Revolution, and so did his own “lady”, Marie-Antoinette. The sounds of the chop’s pock! and the hiss of fluid that followed were clear enough in the memory.

Two centuries before Louis lost his lady, Lady Jane Grey earned her place in the Western psyche as the de facto Queen of England for nine (or was it 13?) days in 1553.

Lady Jane — no, wait, that’s not her.

She was born in October 1537, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII and a grandneice of Henry VIII on the side of her mother, Lady Frances Brandon. Mum, who renounced her own claim to the throne in favour of her daughter, would live to see her beheaded. Jane’s father was Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
The Suffolks – Brandons and later Greys – were the junior branch of Henry VII’s heirs. The 1544 Act of Succession had restored both Elizabeth and her sister Mary Tudor to the line of succession, even though the law continued to regard both of them as bastards, but it was left to Henry VIII to alter the succession at his pleasure.
His three surviving children were first in line, and if none of them bore children, his younger sister Mary would become queen. Eldest sister Margaret Tudor’s offspring were shut out because of her predilection for Scotch.

John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was among the Protestant nobility that got rich when Henry VIII cut up the Catholic properties, and who was regent to Henry’s teenage son-king, Edward VI, was wary of a Catholic comeback and moved to block heir presumptive Mary Tudor (Edward’s Catholic half-sister, Mary Queen of Scots, not his Protestant aunt) from accession. The duke arranged for his ugly, stupid son Guildford Dudley to marry Jane. She freaked, but her parents insisted, as parents always do.

On his deathbed, Edward VI was persuaded to leave the throne to cousin Jane, a good Protestant and smart as a whip, but his signed will had the small problem of being against the law, specifically that Act of Succession, which placed Jane fourth in line after Scottish Mary, Elizabeth (who would be First) and the other daughter, Frances.
Nevertheless, Eddie died on July 6, 1553, and four days later Northumberland had Lady Jane Grey proclaimed Queen of England. She promptly threw a monkey wrench into the duke’s plans, however, by declining to name his son king (her husband became instead the Duke of Clarence).
Poor Guildford, eh wot? And then his mum tells him that he should show Jane who’s boss by refusing to have sex with her!
Leave her castle, Mum said. Stay where you are, Jane said – you can do as you like by night, but by day you stand at my side.

Northumberland also had to deal with Scottish Mary, who understandably saw the law as being on her side. He tried to grab her, but she took off to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, even as popular support was swinging her way thanks to the shameful manner in which her late dad, Henry VIII, had treated her mother, Catherine of Aragon.
Some 20,000 intense men mustered at Framlingham, marched to London and deposed Jane. Mary sat on the throne and asked for one good reason she should let the usurper Jane live. John de Feckenham was assigned to get her to convert to Catholicism. (He might have been nicknamed “Fat Chance” Feckenham, but there’s no record of this.)

As if this wasn’t enough of a mess, Sir Thomas Wyatt launched a Protestant rebellion because Mary wanted to marry Catholic Philip II of Spain, and Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, went and got involved in it, thinking it would be a helpful way of getting Jane back as queen.
Philip figured Jane had to go, and since Jane was still refusing to bow in the general direction fo Rome, Mary decided her head had to roll, and Guildford’s too for good measure.

Jane actually wrote Mary a letter from the Tower, claiming it was a fair cop, but she’d been duped by the duke: “Although my fault be such that but for the goodness and clemency of the Queen, I can have no hope of finding pardon … having given ear to those who at the time appeared not only to myself, but also to the great part of this realm to be wise and now have manifested themselves to the contrary, they having with shameful boldness made so blamable and dishonourable an attempt to give to others that which was not theirs … [and my own] lack of prudence … for which I deserve heavy punishment … it being known that the error imputed to me has not been altogether caused by myself.”

Jane approximately – at least here she’s made it outdoors.
This image is quite rare. I’ve stolen it with thanks from Sonja Marie’s terrific Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum.

On the morning of February 12, 1554, the hapless Guildford Dudley was escorted from his cell at the Tower of London, shortened by a good 10 inches, and carted back inside in pieces, right past Jane’s suite, as though she didn’t already know this was going to be messy.
Lest anyone think Queen Mary was cruel, it must be remembered that she allowed Jane a private execution, something usually reserved for actual royalty. Mary graciously extended the exemption to family.

There’s an anonymous eyewitness account of the scene, Jane appearing in the same black outfit she’d worn at her trial:
“With a book in her hand whereon she prayed all the way till she came to the said scaffold …” and, mounting it, admitted treason to the small invited crowd, yet insisted “I do wash my hands in innocency”. She got Feckenham’s approval to recite the 51st psalm from her book.
“She stood up and gave … [her attendant Mrs Tylney] her gloves and handkercher, and her book to [Sir John Brydges, lieutenant of the Tower]; forthwith she untied her gown. The hangman went to her to help her therewith; then she desired him to let her alone, and also with her other attire and neckercher, giving to her a fair handkercher to knit about her eyes.
“Then the hangman kneeled down, and asked her forgiveness, whom she gave most willingly. Then he willed her to stand upon the straw: which doing, she saw the block. Then she said, ‘I pray you dispatch me quickly.’ Then she kneeled down, saying, ‘Will you take it off before I lay me down?’ [meaning the blindfold] and the hangman answered her, ‘No, madame.’
“She tied the kercher about her eyes; then feeling for the block said, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ One of the standers-by guiding her thereto, she laid her head down upon the block, and stretched forth her body and said: ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!’ And so she ended.”
The executioner hoisted the head and ritually intoned, “So perish all the Queen’s enemies. Behold, the head of a traitor.”

Jane was all of 16 years old.

She and Guildford were buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula (St Peter in chains), the parish church of the Tower of London, built by Henry VIII in 1520. But Jane, having just lost a few pounds, had to put on a little wait first. The chapel was now Catholic again, so good old Feckenham had to go get the court’s permission to have Jane interred there.
While he was raising a legal fuss, her body lay on the bloody hay for nearly four hours, as attested by the French ambassador. Her attendants kept watch but were barred from covering the corpse.

Finally, Jane was laid to rest between two other headless queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the second and fifth wives of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More and Sir John Fisher, Henry’s other pests, were experiencing deja vu from their graves nearby.

Jane’s proclamation as queen was swiftly revoked, but while her Protestant cousin Elizabeth ruled, she was celebrated as a martyr to her faith, and to this day strong-willed people bicker in pubs (maybe) over whether she was “the Thirteen Days’ Queen” (counting from her precedessor’s death on July 6) or “the Nine Days’ Queen” (from the day she ascended the Siege Perilous).

I read in Wikipedia, whose contributors can be clever with context, that Jane has not only been celebrated in Nicholas Rowe’s 1715 tragedy “Lady Jane Grey”, two early films and the 1986 “Lady Jane” with Helena Bonham Carter, and possibly Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately”, but as the ghost of Ravenclaw House in the Harry Potter series.

Hey, wasn’t there a Rolling Stones tune as well? Somebody should look it up.

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Back to the present, or at least this past January, and The Guardian is wondering whether a portrait that hung for years in a house in Streatham, southwest London, is that of Lady Jane.

The newspaper says, perhaps inadvertently, that Jane was the only English “monarch” (!) since 1500 of whom no portrait survives. The National Portrait Gallery thought it had one, but that turned out to be Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth victim, er, wife.

The owner of the Streatham picture swears he got it from his great-grandfather, a collector of 16th-century antiques. It has a faint inscription reading “Lady Jayne”, and her costume matches the fashion of her time.
The jury’s still out on this one, but that picture by Delaroche, that’s some picture.

The best web detail I found on Lady Jane Grey is at EnglishHistory.net.